Venial Sin

For those of you who may not have heard, ETS has introduced a new version of the SAT, creatively titled “The NSAT” (the “N”, as you may well imagine, stands for “New”). In this bastard of a standardised test, the only goal of which seems to be to make high school students the world over suffer neurotic breaks with reality and lose all faith in a higher power, the bastards have included a 25-minute essay section. Motherfuckers.

So, I’ve just found a fantastic flight plan for Paris: US$250 round-trip from Karachi. The only problem is that I can’t find an equally-cheap hotel room or place to stay in the city. I want to stay in the Marais (for obvious reasons), but am willing to move around somewhat. If anyone knows of a cheap hotel/room for rent for a week (March 18th to 25th), or even a youth hostel that doesn’t have curfews, please let me know. Seriously. [...]

So, apparently someone hacked Paris Hilton’s cell phone, and posted the entire phone book on the web. In order to conserve other people’s bandwidth, I’ve copied it here, along with this linkto the original site. In the last hour, although I TOTALLY can’t afford it any more, I’ve lobbed in international calls to Luke Wilson asking for his brother’s number, Gael Garcia Bernal, and Jay-Z (look under “Shawn Carter”), who actually spoke back, and was very nice, although I barely [...]

Well, the birthday’s drawn to an end. Highlights: 1) Lunch with my friend this afternoon. 2) The phone calls and SMS messages from abroad. T.S., Saudi Sex Kitten, and Sarah, thank you. You made my day.

Dear all, Thank you for the wishes, but I see nothing to celebrate in the fact that I can no longer refer to myself as being “in my early twenties”. Don’t get me wrong. I appreciate each and ever every message/e-mail/text message/singing telegram/sky-writing/voice-mail that has so far been hurled my way, I really do. But I generally have terrible birthdays, and this one has, so far, proven to be no exception. I say this only so that you can understand [...]

A post on a friend’s blog got me thinking about the number of retarded, utterly, blatantly, insulting-to-my-intelligence-or-indeed-the-intelligence-of -a-mentally-deficient-aardvark (no, I have nothing against aardvarks, I just like scapegoating them) spam messages I used to receive via e-mail once upon a time. Spam is certainly annoying, but the sheer nonsense of it used to crack me up occasionally (although once in a while, I’d feel bad about my inability to muster any sort of enthusiasm for assisting Dr. Ngubo wa Thangur, [...]

My friend just sent me a link to this site, and I simply had to share it with y’all. Valentine’s Day is almost over here in Karachi, but most of you should have at least another couple of hours to share these gems with the world. Happy VD. Pun intended.

The Day of St. Valentine. Bah, humbug.

I had a very odd dream last night, involving someone who has always occupied a strange place in my life. He’s drifted in and out, at times closer than I would ever have believed, on other occasions, so completely alien that I doubted he was the same person whom I had befriended; I’ve always known him to be brilliant, highly individualistic, and often utterly maddening. And at the end of the day, I’ve realised that no matter what, I’ve always [...]

I went out to dinner tonight with a friend or two; most people have been in Lahore this past weekend for Basant, which is the annual spring/kite-flying festival; basically a massive, four-day party. Liquor flows in plenty, people get very hammered on all manner of substances, and there’re several parties to attend each and every night. Unfortunately, I missed the damn’ thing this year, but that’s OK; they’d moved it up a few days to account for Moharram, which is [...]